Ottawa rushes to tighten up entry rules before 70,000 Canadians are declared Mi’kmaq

How 100,000 Newfoundlanders could be declared members of Mi’kmaq First Nation

For more than 60 years, the policy from Ottawa was that there were no official aboriginals from the island of Newfoundland.

Now, less than two years after the feds granted aboriginal rights to the province’s Mi’kmaq people, the federal government says there are too many.

In the fall of 2011, in what a government press release deemed a “historic occasion,” the department of Aboriginal Affairs granted official Indian Act status to the Newfoundland Mi’kmaq, a group that had been denied any claim to aboriginal title ever since the province’s 1949 entry into Confederation.

But in the months since, an unanticipated 100,000 people, the equivalent of more than one fifth of Newfoundland’s total population, have stepped forward with ancestry claims.

Faced with the prospect of putting a St. John’s-worth of new Indians on the balance sheet, federal negotiators have put the brakes on new applications and scrambled to renegotiate their original deal with the Qalipu Mi’kmaq First Nation, the governing body for the Newfoundland Mi’kmaq.

“If the federal government had done their homework on this and looked at the complexity of Newfoundland history … I think they might have gotten some hint that there was a lot of Mi’kmaq blood mixed in among the people,” said Hector Pearce, 68, the vice-chair of Qalipu Watchdogs, a group representing the 70,000-plus applicants left in limbo by the renegotiation.

The group does not claim its membership are all Mi’kmaq, but they simply want their forms to be processed. “[We] are just asking to be treated the same as those who have already been accepted,” wrote Watchdogs spokeswoman Erika Lavers in a Monday email to the Post.

In a controversial March 22 endorsement of government efforts, however, Qalipu chief Brendan Sheppard said “it was neither reasonable nor credible to expect more than 100,000 applications to be members of the Qalipu band.”

He added that more than 70% of the applications had come not from Newfoundland, but from “elsewhere in Canada.”

His comments were echoed six days later in the House of Commons when Greg Rickford, parliamentary secretary to the Minister of Aboriginal Affairs, said the flood of applications was “four times the original estimated number” of 12,000.

“These figures are all the more questionable since it has become clear that many of the late stage of applications appear to no longer reside in that province,” he said.

Nevertheless, opponents maintain that if the government did not want 88,000 surprise Indians, they should have drawn up better membership criteria.

“This agreement was not written on the back of an envelope; all of the eligibility criteria for who would be a member of Qalipu was all mapped out,” said Gerry Byrne, a Newfoundland Liberal MP who has taken up the cause of the 70,000 Mi’kmaq.

Under the original Ottawa-approved terms of the Qalipu settlement agreement, would-be Mi’kmaq needed only to provide some evidence of aboriginal ancestry and dig up some census or church records to prove that one of their ancestors had lived in a pre-1949 Newfoundland Mi’kmaq community.

Applicants did not need to live in Newfoundland and even had some wiggle room on the question of aboriginal heritage. As indicated on the Qalipu website, the First Nation’s enrolment committee needed only to be assured that aboriginal heritage was “more likely than unlikely.”

Says Mr. Byrne, for the federal government to approve those terms, and then blame applicants for over-applying, they must be guilty of “incompetence, negligence or an outright lie.”

Unlike other aboriginals in Atlantic Canada, the Newfoundland Mi’kmaq have historically not been recognized as rights-bearing aboriginals and only saw “ad-hoc funding … for social and health programs,” according to Aboriginal Affairs.

Given Mi’kmaq history, it is not improbable that the group would host unforeseen pockets of members. The Newfoundland Mi’kmaq were among Canada’s first aboriginal groups to encounter Europeans — and the interim four centuries have seen plenty of contact.

On top of that, for the last generation or so Mi’kmaq have done well to keep quiet about their heritage, said Mr. Pearce, something he credits with potentially skewing the province’s census data.

“It was really not a very popular idea to be strutting around indicating that you were Mi’kmaq,” he said.

Mr. Byrne claims the federal government’s estimates of aboriginal claimants has never been particularly accurate. In the lead up to the 2006 Indian Residential Schools Settlement Agreement, for instance, federal officials estimated that a maximum of 12,000 former students would step forward.

By last July, the secretariat tasked with handling the agreement has processed more than 30,000 claimants — driving up costs by more than $2-billion.
National Post